For The Birds

When my daughter was a toddler, she was terrorized by a bunch of mallards. It’s not unheard of. Lots of people have been left emotionally scarred by ducks. Just look at Huey, Louie, and Dewey. The triplets might have been angels if not for the bad-tempered influence of their uncles, Scrooge McDuck and Donald. I know the feeling. Once, when I was a kid, I tried to disguise a bad word by doing an imitation of Donald and I still got my mouth washed out with soap.  

Ducks have a dark side, like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. As long as they float around placidly in some unprotected public pond, everybody thinks they’re adorable. Moms stand their toddlers on the banks of that waterhole, taking pictures while their babies toss out breadcrumbs until the bag is empty. Giggling at the antics of the splashy little showboaters, people completely forget they’re only seeing one side of these birds. It’s easy to do. As long as you’re rewarding them with attention, they’ll put on one heck of a show. 

But when you’re all out of bread and the kiddos have run out of steam and you head to the car with your worn-out little munchkins, that’s when everything changes. Their SeaWorld imitation is over. Suddenly, an entire herd of Hydes will emerge from that black lagoon, and on tiny, impossibly strong and waterlogged legs, they will chase you down like they were lions on safari.

And that’s why my daughter still hates birds. As a two-year-old she was nearly pecked to pieces by wild, cranky ducks. Thank goodness we stopped laughing long enough to pick her up and rescue her. We’re just lucky she doesn’t hate us.

I think birds have the innate capacity to bring out both admiration and loathing in humans. We’re astonished at the way hundreds of them all fly in V formations as they head south for the winter, lacking both internet access and a roadmap. I wish I knew how they pull that off. I can’t even find my way out of a grocery store parking lot most of the time.

But every morning this summer as I opened the sliders to my back patio, arms laden with a steaming mug of cocoa, a plate of biscuits, my water bottle, a pair of reading glasses, and my cellphone, as I approached the glass table top—where I planned to set all of that down before I sat myself down—I found it covered in bird poop, deposited overnight by a bunch of selfish grackles homesteading in the ash tree overhead. Finally, after a week of this disgusting behavior, as I cleaned off their crap again, I yelled up into the massive branches where they were hiding, “The next time you do this I’m gonna get my gun and there will be Bird Soup for dinner! Tell your little friends!”

It was an empty threat, and they knew it. The truth is, if someone served me soup made from a bunch of poopy blackbirds, I’d throw up.

I don’t hate every bird. There’s a curious roadrunner who’s been visiting my house every day for months. He squeezes past the fence post into my enclosed back patio and stares at me through the sliding glass doors as if I’m the one behind bars. Or maybe he’s checking out his own reflection, hoping the female in the mirror thinks he’s good looking, too. The neighbors call him Rudy, but I named him Pete because everybody knows Pete is a better name for a roadrunner.

I like Pete. I like roadrunners. They’re not your ordinary bird. They eat bugs and overpower rattlesnakes. They’re primitive about it, kind of like Cro-Magnon man. Not having ten fingers with which to aim a rifle, instead they grab their prey with their beaks and smash the nasty vipers against a rock. That makes them a hero in my book, so having a roadrunner around is a great idea. It means there won’t be any rattlesnakes around. Also, I’m pretty sure Pete doesn’t poop. Not on my table, anyway. Pete has manners.

And then there are the comedian birds with lousy radar. They don’t fly south for the winter, I assume, because they have no sense of direction. Also the reason I don’t fly south for the winter. What these guys do instead is fly south into my front windows, nearly every afternoon, head first. My windows aren’t even clean, in part because there are feathered faceplants all over them, so they have no excuse for not seeing that there is a window attached to that house. They’re just not paying attention. While their inner voice is screaming, “Pull up! Pull up! For the love of God and all that is holy, pull up!” they flaunt their feathers instead and push ahead full throttle, convinced there’s no such thing as a glass barrier they can’t fly through.

So far, no birds have been harmed in the making of beaked imprints on my windows. Nor has their self-confidence been impaired. Tomorrow afternoon they’ll slam into them all over again, shake it off, and determine that if they keep on trying that glass ceiling will shatter for them. It won’t, because birds bounce, but they’ll forget that. Also, I now know where the term “bird brain” comes from.

So, what have we learned? Ducks are despicable and dangerous to two-year-olds. Grackles are as useless as roaches and have the manners of Gordon Ramsay. Roadrunners are our friends and I’d like them even better if they ate scorpions more of the time because there don’t seem to be any rattlesnakes around here. And finally, the reason I never wash my windows is not because I’m lazy. It’s because it’s pointless.

Tune in next time when I discuss the pros and cons of our politicians. Talk about bird brains.

With thanks to Nigel for snapping the stellar photo seen above. The original can be viewed with this link:  IMG_6070-4 | Wood Duck Attack ! | Nigel | Flickr

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

Dusty. Noisy. A little on the chilly side. Their faces obscured in the dim light of evening, throngs of people clumped together, shivering. Wanderers in the night, they picked their way carefully across rough ground. Laughter and conversation melded together with the occasional bray of a donkey and cry of a baby, while the scent carried on the breeze was a blend of hot cider and manure. Not your typical Christmas cocktail. Fortunately, the food court was a safe distance away from the animal stalls.

High above the back lot of the Methodist Church, the Star of Bethlehem rose thirty feet in the air and, like everyone else, we followed it in search of the Christ Child.

It was a festival atmosphere where multiple churches came together in interfaith cooperation and provided an evening of free food and hot drinks, hayrides around the property, live music, a petting zoo, and a living nativity where we found Mary and Joseph and the rest of the cast squeezed tightly together inside a tented enclosure, suffering perhaps from a smidge of claustrophobia and a side of stage fright. It seemed authentic to me. I’ve always suspected that’s how it really was, considering the way Luke described the scene when the shepherds arrived. “And they came with haste and found Mary and Joseph and the babe lying in a manger.” It must have been crowded in that manger, just like the live nativity in front of us. But the little Lord Jesus, no crying he made.

We made our way over to a semi-circle of folding chairs where a man stood before a microphone reading the Christmas story. You’re still wondering about King James’ wording in Luke, right? Or the way I interpret things? I can’t help it. Things like that just stand out to me sometimes. Like the nugget I picked up listening to the reading of the scripture. Turns out, Gabriel and Michael aren’t the only angels named in the Bible. There’s at least one more, and Luke is the only one who gives him credit, right there in chapter two. If you ask me, it’s about time this one got some street cred for showing up. “And Lo, the angel of the Lord, came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them, and they were sore afraid.”

It's not one you hear every day, but I predict it will soon become as trendy as Gabriel and Michael in next year’s list of most popular baby names. And when it does, remember you heard it here first. Lo. The angel who scared the shepherds.

Also, your grammar teacher was right. Commas matter.

By now my back was hurting and, as I settled onto one of the folding chairs, my daughter followed after her kids and their friends who wanted to hitch a ride on some hay bales that a John Deere tractor was busy pulling around the parking lot. As soon as the narrator finished speaking, he disappeared, and a woman set up her music at the electric keyboard facing us. The choir lined up in rows behind her and a teenaged boy snugged up to his cello where he sat beside the pianist. The choir director raised her arms, the accompaniment began, and thirty young people began to sing.

It was my favorite Christmas carol. And it seemed as if they were singing just for me—the lonely widow staring down the third Christmas without her darling, daring to let her heart experience a few of the traditions she enjoyed for years with a husband she still can’t believe is gone. 

The young vocalists sang their hearts out while stragglers wandered by, oblivious to the performance, busily chatting and drinking their cider, kicking up dirt and ignoring the concert. In the distance, the sound of a diesel engine with its load of delighted, noisy passengers added to the patchwork feel of the festival’s array of Christmas events, but a small audience grateful for a place to sit listened to the words of a song which had been running through my mind for weeks. The choir stood front and center through it all, backlit by all the dust in the air, as if a fog machine was cloaking them in ethereal billows of tan.

And I wondered if miracles are always overshadowed like this, sent out into a world that isn't sure what to believe, easily distracted by artificial lights and cotton candy and face paint. The choir sang the words, the pianist played her keys, but it was the mournful tones of the cello that captivated me. Amid the flurry of crowds of people on their way to experience something else, the cellist played haunting notes that spoke to us of a promise fulfilled and hope restored. And I sat there on my folding chair in the grimy darkness and wept. From my broken heart. For my broken dreams. And for this song which I longed to hear this Christmas.

“Oh, come, Oh, come, Emmanuel
And ransom captive Israel
That mourns in lonely exile here
Until the Son of God appear.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to Thee, O Israel.”

The cellist played every note a tempo while the pianist supported his interpretation. The passion imparted by the instrument was the same mosaic of longing created by the composer, and one that I feel in my soul every day since the moment Rob died. A desire for answers, for rescue, for reunion, for redemption. As my son often reminds me, it’s a yearning for God to make right everything that has gone wrong in His world. And, somehow, too, in mine.

The cellist drew his bow one last time across his instrument and as the haunting note faded, the spell was broken, and we headed home. Soon all the musicians and actors and animals would follow suit. Instruments packed up. The manger stored away for another year. Leftover food and beverages sent home with anyone willing to take some. Lights all shut down, the parking lot empty. There was no apparent reason for even an angel named Lo to hang back and hover, announcing to a weary world that God is with us in our troubles.

Except that I need that reminder. I needed to hear it that night. In the melancholy voice of a young man's cello I heard the echo of my own heart’s cry for Emmanuel, God With Us. I needed to know I am seen in the moments when I feel invisible. That I am heard though heaven is silent. In the middle of a dusty, noisy assortment of holiday entertainments, the cellist’s bow sang for me and all others for whom Christmas no longer feels like the most wonderful time of the year.

This is why Jesus came. To become one of us. To ransom the captives and set us free from all the broken places where life has taken us. He knows how we feel. He suffered here, too.

Oh come, Oh come, Emmanuel. To all of us who follow Bethlehem's star where it shines above the  back lot of the Methodist Church, directly into the face of the Christ Child.

The one who came to forever be With Us.

It Wasn't Me

Boy, is she in big trouble. 

I don’t know what got into her this week. Not only is there no excuse for her behavior (since she couldn’t give me one,) but if she doesn’t straighten up, she’s gonna be out of a job.

I gave her a task yesterday while I went into my office to write. I closed the door so she wouldn’t interrupt me, and we both went to work. By the time I was done, it was nearly dark. She’d already finished and returned home. I went to the living room windows to close the blinds and there, on the floor at my feet, lay my best houseplant, upside down, dumped in a heap, tendrils all twisted and broken, gasping for . . . whatever plants gasp for. Water and potting soil bled together when she fell, creating a miserable, muddy mess all over the floor. I have no idea how long this went unnoticed.

It’s not like I’m some kind of plant lady with mad gardening skills. Most of my plants are factory warranted. Those are my favorites. They don’t need water or food or fish gut juice, thank goodness. And gross. Their one weakness is they need to be dusted. In my opinion, that’s just asking too much. I prefer plants that thrive on neglect. I just don’t know where to get one of those.

But somewhere I read that if you can keep a hardy green plant alive, it'll reward you by absorbing toxins from the air and repurposing them into carbon dioxide or something. Don’t quote me. I may have that backwards, but it’s close enough. So, three little orphaned green things, which shall remain nameless because I have no idea what any of them are, sit in their own pots in my great room, waiting for me to remember to water them. Week after week after boring week. So, I do. I don’t like it, but it’s better than running out of carbon dioxide.

I don’t know if there was some kind of conflict that went down this week while I was busy writing my first famous and unbelievably successful future novel. There did appear to have been a struggle. I’ll admit, this plant is already something of a drama queen. Even though she lay at my feet looking sad and pathetic and possibly dead, it’s not the first time she’s been there. If I don’t water her once a week or notice when her foliage looks feeble, she tips over in a thirsty faint like she's Scarlett O'Hara and falls to the floor all by herself. She’s done that twice now. She did it night before last, in fact. But I swept her up like I was her personal Rhett Butler and carried her lifeless form to the kitchen where, right there at my farm sink, she miraculously resuscitated. So, there’s no need for you to go and turn me in to the local nursery or some antebellum neighborhood watch. She was drunk with water and happy as a lark the last time I saw her.

There was absolutely no reason for her to simply fall over yesterday afternoon, weighed down as she was by all the liquid she guzzled the night before. It was embarrassing how much she drank. All I could think as I stared at her twisted, lifeless form was she’d been thrown to the ground against her will, which couldn’t have been easy as bloated as she was. Oh, the humanity. But who was the perpetrator of this random act of violence? I sure didn't do it.

If I had to guess, it looked like the work of a family pet, but I don’t have one. I don’t even own a goldfish. Looking around the quiet space, my eyes finally came to rest on the only possible suspect who could be responsible for this crime. It was the silence that gave her away. There, in the corner, feigning innocence and refusing to make eye contact, she sat quietly at home, pretending she had no idea what had happened to my desecrated plant thing.

I leaned over to give her a performance review, smacked her with a rolled-up newspaper, and yelled, “Bad, bad Roomba!”

I knew it was her, the cranky little floor sucker. I've watched her race around the room doing figure eights like an ice skater, sailing to and fro between the baseboards until she bounces off the kitchen cabinets. Then she flies across the living room rug, circling the area in a pattern that can only be described as “two-year-old scribble.”  But this time she went too far. It all made sense. As she rounded the wall near my piano, she inhaled the long, formerly leafy vines that used to cascade elegantly from my houseplant to the floor, and chewed them up, yanking the entire plant down beside her.  

The glutton. No one told me she’s a vegetarian. I would definitely have opted for a different model if I’d known that. 

Perhaps I have myself to blame. I went through the room before I turned her loose on it, moving curtains and blanket corners out of the way, but I never once thought about my innocent little neurotic plant. In all these months since I welcomed Roomba into my home, she’s never before tried to eat it.

Until this week. I guess the honeymoon is over.

The frustrating part, though, is that I can’t prove a thing. There was no mud clinging to her exterior. No perlite pieces plugging her sensors. She wasn't even wet. My Ring doorbell could have videotaped the atrocity, but it only invades the privacy of visitors when they stop by. I haven’t even had the courage to empty her trash compartment yet to search for evidence. I don’t think I could stomach it.

So, what am I to do with this incorrigible machine? This purported time-saver that regularly costs me peace and creates aggravation. Vacuum my own floors? You must be kidding. Hire a real live housekeeper? How would I explain that to my accountant? Roomba didn't even flinch when I gave her a swat with my performance review. I think we all know who the real boss is here.

I'm out of options. I think the only answer is to take down my curtains, give away my throw blankets, and toss out all three plants. But if I die from a lack of carbon dioxide in my own home, promise me you’ll kick Roomba to the curb for me. And don’t let her make you feel guilty for doing it.

She had it coming.

With thanks to Thomas H. for capturing the innocent face of the cutie pie seen above who did not attack my house plant, and allowing me to use the photo here. Fooled you, didn't I? The original photo can be viewed at this site: 

Guilty | Thomas H | Flickr

Wild At Heart

Once upon a time, when we were young and made our own adventures, Rob and I used to camp. When the kids came along, we did it with diapers and bottles and baby walkers. We had energy back then. Strength and vitality and ignorance. Camping usually proved that in spades.

We needed a break one year but had no money, which was a common theme for young marrieds like us. So, Rob and I borrowed his parents fancy green tripped out travel van. I forget what kind and he’s not here to ask, so that’s all you get. But trust me. It was fancy. It seemed fancy to us, anyway. He had a few days off from work. Maybe it was just a weekend, forty-eight hours away from the fire department. But on weekends we were super busy, especially on Sundays, with church. Not this weekend. This time we needed a break and we planned for it.

We had a toddler on our hands, and we were both tired. And, as I said, broke. Hence, borrowing the fancy camper van. But we had camping stuff. Tents and tarps and sleeping bags. We even had a zip up ramada thing (again – Rob’s not here to give me the right words and I don’t feel like googling right now) to keep the bugs off and keep us dry in case it rained. Remember that part, about the rain. It was summer in Florida out in the woods. It rains.

We cleared our calendars. Found people to cover for us and our various responsibilities. And then with two heel clicks in the air, we hit the road with our eighteen month old son, Lee. We drove about an hour away to Osprey, Florida, to Oscar Scherer State Park. It had camping areas and bathroom facilities that made camping feel more civilized, especially with a toddler around. The day was warm and humid, but there was a breeze which made it pleasant while Rob set up the zipper ramada thing. Or, more accurately, while Rob attempted to set it up. I tried to help, but a toddler in the woods near a lake with alligators known to climb the low, no-climb fencing requires all of a mother’s attention.

The enclosure’s instructions were vague and we needed to position it ‘just so’ over the picnic table at our campsite. Poles didn’t line up. And when they did, he was only one man and I was MIA chasing down a giggly baby boy. While he tried in vain to control three sides of the enclosure, poles fell down, collapsing the netted structure, and Rob’s practically perfect phacade phailed.

There were very few times when I saw him lose his temper in all the years we were married. I could count them on one hand. Honestly. This was one of those times.

Remember the rain? We moved to my home state of Arizona ten years after we married, leaving the Sunshine State to raise our family in the desert instead. It never rains in the desert. I grew up here and I can attest to that. Of course, that’s not entirely true, but it feels true. Therefore, it must be true. To this day, whenever the weatherman predicts even a fifty per cent chance of rain, it means there’s a miniscule chance that half the state might get a shower. For the rest of us, if a drained-out thundercloud floats wearily across the sky, dripping the remnants of whatever it dumped somewhere else, we count the drops on our windshield and thank God that the drought is over.

That’s rain in the desert.

Rain in the tropics is different. Especially when one man singlehandedly attempts to erect a flimsy structure which straddles a large picnic table while dark, menacing, storm clouds gather from the west, which is the Gulf side of the state. There’s a lot of water in the Gulf. You could even say it’s a bottomless supply that a thunderstorm sucks up like a vacuum. When a summer shower is on the move, you might think you have plenty of time to set up camp and pull this miracle off. You don’t. You might think fifty per cent means the storm will slide to the south and baptize Naples instead of Osprey. It won’t. You might think the lightning flashes you notice are further away than the twenty miles of buffer you need right now. They aren’t.

Our camping spot was surrounded by mature pines a hundred fifteen feet tall that swayed in the wind like lightning rods. In no time at all, the distant storm clouds blew in over us, the sun disappeared, the zippered ramada thing betrayed us and fell down, and terrified animals raced by us, two by two. None of that was the problem.

Lightning. That was the problem.

As a bolt found its mark somewhere in the park, the ground shook and our ears hurt from the thunder’s shock wave. Rob dropped the metal pole he held and yelled, “Get in the truck with Lee, NOW!”

I didn’t even think of arguing. I told him to come with us, but he shook his head and kept fighting with the popup enclosure. Lee ran off, chasing a rabbit or something not green like an alligator. I raced after him, grabbed him around his scrawny little waist, and carried him crying and wiggling back to the fancy van. We jumped inside and, soaking wet, plopped down in the relative safety of its dry interior, watching Rob fight against failure, refusing to give in to the wind and heavy downpour. Soaked to the bone and backlit by explosive lightning and terrifying thunder, the man would not quit.

Here's another thing about Rob that most people didn’t know. His spiritual gift was stubbornness. He hated giving in. Hated losing at anything, especially playing Scrabble with me. Fortunately, he was also a really smart man who eventually admitted he was no match for a Florida thunderstorm in the woods. He threw down the soaking wet popup in disgust and raced over to where we sat inside the fancy van. He jumped in, slammed the door shut, steam rising off his head—not from the elements, but from his own anger.

Lee and I didn’t say a word. I’d never seen him mad like that before. There we all sat, in silence, waiting for him to cool off and say something. But he just looked out the windshield, soaking wet, sitting in the driver’s seat, with his thinning, curly hair plastered to his head.

And then, movement. A single drop of rain rolled slowly down his forehead and dripped off the end of his curved nose.

As God is my witness, I just couldn’t help myself. I put a hand to my face to try to stop it, but it was already in motion. Too late. I started laughing. Looking at me for his cue, Lee started laughing. Rob turned to glare at us but he couldn’t pull it off. His face turned tail, selling him out, and he dissolved into laughter, too, his shoulders shaking while he held his belly, he threw his head back and roared. There we sat, the three of us, dripping wet inside the fancy van, howling at the hilarious indignity Rob had just survived.

I’ve never met anyone who could laugh at himself the way Rob could.

When the storm blew by, the campsite was soaked, the popup was decimated and soggy, and we didn’t even think twice. In less than five minutes, we’d gathered up the survivors of our doomed expedition, threw the muddy mess into the back of the fancy van, and drove home. We pulled into the garage, closed the door, and never told a soul until Monday that we were there or how we’d created the original Stay-Cay by bailing on our camping trip and sleeping in our own warm, dry beds for the entire weekend.

It was glorious. There were no cell phones back then. No telephone answering machines. No one was expecting us at church or work or family anything. No one knew were home with the garage door closed, protecting our privacy. No one had any reason to call and interrupt our focus on our family. There, in the middle of civilization, in the aftermath of failure, we seized the moment and disconnected.

I was thinking about that trip last night. Every one of our camping trips was as miserable and memorable and laughable as that one. But that one, I think, has always been my favorite.

The weekend we cleared our calendars and just stayed home.

The Great Vay-Cay. Our unexpected disconnect. What a great idea.

With thanks to Dennis Church for permission to include the fabulous photo seen above. The original can be viewed by following this link: American Alligator | Six Mile Cypress Slough | Dennis Church | Flickr

Pickled Jalapenos

“What happened to your leg?” she asked, looking at its fresh scar as I tucked my feet into the warm water of the pedicure basin.

“Knife fight.”

Her eyes went wide, and she sat back in her low seat. “What?!”

I knew why she was surprised. In my blue jeans, pullover top, and sensible sandals I don’t look like the type to get into a bar brawl. I’m not. I don’t drink. And I wouldn’t want to ruin my nails.

“I was attacked by a dermatologist and she won,” I said. Skin cancers are my true enemies, not assailants in back alleys. Just to be safe, though, I try to avoid back alleys.

People underestimate me all the time. They size me up in half a glance and think they know me, sometimes writing me off in the process. Gray-blonde hair, probably a grandma. True. No wedding ring, must be a widow. Also true, although that one hurts. A lot. Squints at street signs, must need glasses. Seriously? Everyone my age squints. Sensible sandals, probably boring. Not true. My feet don’t typically get me in trouble. My mouth does.

Reconnecting at lunch with an old friend, she noticed something about me while I held the menu at arms’ length.

“Does that say the burgers come with jalapenos?” I asked her. “Cuz it kind of looks like they put pickles on them.”

“It says pickled jalapenos.”

“Oh. Maybe I’ll just have salad then. Pickles offend me.” I set the menu aside and picked up my coke.

“You have a tattoo,” she announced.

“I do?” I looked at my arm where a purple symbol smiled back at me. “I do!”

She laughed. “You don’t seem the type to have tattoos.”

“You have to watch out for the quiet ones,” I said. 

Warning people about quiet types usually makes them lean their heads to one side. They wonder what other secrets I'm hiding. What inside intel do I have that could make a salad appear more tantalizing than a pickled jalapeno burger?

I have two tattoos. Three, if you count the fact that I had the first one done twice. It hurt twice, so I’m counting it that way. The other one is on the inside of my foot which is one of the most painful places to let someone stab you with needles, so I’m counting that one twice, too. That gives me a grand total of four tattoos and a medal for bravery. Or idiocy. It’s a toss-up.

She was right, though. I don’t seem the type to do wild and crazy things. When I walk through a door, cloaked in insecurity as I am, I dress in a manner which allows me to blend in with the wallpaper. Although, I prefer to think of it as being stealthy. If no one notices me, it gives me plenty of time to size them up, too. I guess it works both ways.

It’s not like my Boring Badge is a new thing, though. I’ve had it since kindergarten when all the boys chased Brigitte Nelson across the playground because she was so perky while I watched from the top of the monkey bars because I was so sensible.  No way was I going to let a herd of five-year-olds tackle me in the grass. Do you know how hard it is to get grass stains out of a blue jumper?

Things were no better in high school. Instead of joining the yearbook committee with its cool staff advisor and after-school parties, I wrote articles for the school newspaper in a classroom where they never ordered in pizza during editing. Yearbooks are forever. Newspapers are for washing windows, if they even exist anymore, which I’m pretty sure they don’t.

Right after graduation, I married and went to work as a secretary for a law firm. Secretaries don’t exist anymore either because typewriters went the way of newspapers. Lawyers, however, have the same longevity as yearbooks. And the same after-school parties every Friday, only at the Five O’Clock Club. As fun as I know I am, I’m not as much fun as my also-married boss thought I should be.

One morning, he unexpectedly placed both hands on my desk, leaned in close and said, “I’d like to get you drunk some time and find out what you’re really like.”

I looked into his spectacled eyes where a slip of graying hair fell over the rim of his glasses and told him that would never happen.

“Why?” he asked. “Are you that good at keeping secrets?”

“No,” I told him. “I’m that good at staying sober.”

See, today we would call that sexual harassment. In 1977, I called it quits. I bet he never thought I’d expose him here in public for that. Surprise! Lucky for him, he’s probably dead by now and doesn’t care.

There are lots of ways to have fun that don’t involve hangovers or nasty extra-marital affairs. Actually, those two things don’t sound fun at all. They sound like a recipe for self-destruction and I’m too big a chicken to want to risk that.

I’m just saying, I think it’s fun to surprise people by not turning out to be the person they think you are. It’s kind of easy for me to do that to people because life keeps forcing me to change directions. I’m not turning out to be the person I thought I was, either. I’m discovering that some of my friends were right—I’m braver than I believed and stronger than I seem.

I’m toying with the idea of getting a third/fifth tattoo. Something delicate but bold, attractive but cautionary. Something that tells people who I am right off the bat so they can save time sizing me up or putting me down. A friend of mine has one of these. I bet she’d let me borrow it.

Fierce.   In twelve-point Lucida Sans Typewriter font. Just for old times’ sake. 

I don’t think it would scare off my dermatologist, though. I’ve got to stop meeting her in back alleys.

Seated at the Bench

They needed a pianist. Someone to softly play his favorite old hymns. I didn’t know him. I didn’t know any of them. They didn’t go to our church. I don’t remember how they landed there that morning. What I remember is the love they had for him. And I remember his wife.

When you’re a church pianist, you have a bird’s eye view of everything and everyone. You see water drip off the noses of the recently baptized. You notice who’s missing from the choir, how much more gray the pastor’s hair is now, and are in the right spot to throw a glaring stare at your misbehaving children.

I'd played for weddings and funerals before. It wasn’t unusual for me to serve as a musician in someone else’s drama. I just never meant to become invested in their stories. After all, someone needed to stay calm, cool, and collected. And when you’re playing favorite hymns for a grieving family, it’s important to make those quarter notes land correctly on the ivories beneath your fingers. Blurry vision is a hazard.

Hearts have a mind of their own.

I couldn’t keep my eyes off her. Surrounded by a squadron of burly sons, she sat on the front row, her attention focused on the speaker at the mic, smiling. Soft whisps of white hair encircled her wrinkled face, but her eyes were bright, and she nodded her head throughout every tribute given for her late husband. She was the bravest woman I thought I’d ever seen, and it leveled me. How did she do it? How could she sit there and smile, watching her grown sons weep as, one by one, they told of the great love their father had for them and his wife? How in every pickup truck he’d ever bought, the first thing he did was install a seat belt in the center of the bench seat so she could sit right beside him while they drove together.

She just smiled and nodded, still feeling the deep love of a man she would never sit next to again.

When the service was over, I joined the long line of sympathetic guests who waited their turn to offer condolences to the family. I didn’t know what I would say. It just seemed appropriate to acknowledge their loss and not simply be the paid musician who showed up for an hour or two. I needn’t have worried. When it was my turn to awkwardly shake hands with each of them and hug their eighty-year-old mother, I broke down in tears and couldn’t say anything.

The kindhearted widow held my hands and looked into my sad face. “Are you all right, dear?” she gently asked.

Ironic. And kind of hilarious. I never saw her shed a tear, but she was moved by mine. The mourning widow comforting the stranger who wept for her. And, if I’m honest, wept for myself.

Sometimes in life you may notice that it’s difficult to watch the sorrow of others because their circumstances mirror what you know deep down will one day be your story. And it terrifies. I sat there on that piano bench watching grown men cry and observing the diminutive rock of a woman who clearly was the family glue, thinking and hoping that a day like theirs would never come for me. I had it all planned out. I would, of course, go first because Rob would be so much better at handling loss than I would. Plus, he was healthier than me. It just made sense.

But when has life ever made sense? And why do we maintain the illusion that we have control?

The day came for me anyway, seated on the front row, listening to tributes made too soon for my husband. There are few things I remember about that day. His fire helmet placed on top of his grave, a framed photo of him wearing it sat propped on the headstone, his name chiseled into the granite below, and relentless sorrow chiseled into my soul. How did I get through all of that? How am I still getting through it? All the lessons that accompany sadness and sorrow? The realization that grief comes to stay, that you don’t “get over it”, you don’t heal. For the rest of your life you simply learn to carry it and find your way through the dark.

I was thinking about that funeral and the smiling widow today. Who knows what was going on within her. I could only observe from the outside. What surprised me was my reaction to this family’s tragedy. I wanted to stay detached the way the pastor was. Just do my job and stand aloof from the emotion. Offer my sympathy and get out. Get away. Don’t let it rattle my sense of security.

That’s the difference between sympathy and empathy. Sympathy is when we feel for someone, but not with them. Sympathy recognizes the sad story and that’s as far as it goes. Sympathy watches from the piano bench and prays to God that they never find themselves on the front row.

But empathy takes the risk of identifying with the pain of someone else. Empathy taps into its own experiences and similar emotions. Empathy, says Brene Brown, is where we drop down into the hole where someone else sits overwhelmed by painful feelings and circumstances, and we say to them, “Hey, I know what it’s like down here and you’re not alone.” Empathy shows up to weep with those who weep, sit with those who can’t move, remains silent with those who have no words, and witnesses the pain so their person won’t be alone.

It makes me wonder why we send “sympathy” cards to people when their hearts are breaking. It’s something. I know. It’s better than nothing. But what if we ditched all the platitudes Hallmark overcharges us for and simply put our hearts in a handwritten note that risks being honest about loss? What if we wrote, “This is so hard and I am so sorry for the pain you are going through. I love you.” As someone who stood over a trash can tossing sympathy cards that told me it was God’s will for Rob to die and explained how God had more work for me to do here and that my memories would be a good enough substitute for having my husband beside me, it became evident that the majority of sympathy cards don’t cut it. What I needed, what I still need, what we all need, is empathy.

When it’s all been said and done, the thing that helps carry us through our pain is the courage of people who just show up and sit beside us without trying to fix something that cannot be fixed. Even if it’s awkward. Even if they fear doing it wrong. Even if they fear it will happen to them someday, too, if it hasn’t already. They are willing to witness the sadness and pain of another and not try to talk them out of it. They do this because we are all human and death is a part of life.

I used to sit on the bench, watch from the sidelines, feeling helpless at the sight of ongoing grief. I sent useless cards. I avoided sad people. I’m not proud of any of this. Our culture is so uncomfortable with sorrow and it was as though I was their mascot.

I hope, after all I’ve been through, all that I have suffered, all that I have lost, that I am learning to choose empathy, too.

Green Thumb

I must be the worst gardener on the planet. You probably think you collected that award years ago, but I have news for you. There is only one rotten nurserywoman per century, and she is me. My reputation is so vast that no one has ever even asked me to volunteer with the babies at church. Just mention my name and the word nursery in the same sentence and watch what happens. Mothers run away screaming with their infants and florists lock their doors. Thus, the reason you never received a flower arrangement from me at the birth of your child. By the way, belated congratulations.

Obviously, some confusion has occurred. Let me clear things up once and for all. Babies like me. Plants don’t.

I’ve mentioned this problem before, but since the number of followers who read my blog is less than the total number of surviving plants in my front yard, it may have gone unnoticed. Shocking, right? It doesn’t make sense to me either. I’m a kindhearted soul.  I’ve donated to people in need. Wiped the tears from brokenhearted grandbabies. Thrown my trash in the garbage instead of the street. You’d think I could make plants like me. Help them reach their full potential. Thrive and flourish and elicit rapturous sighs from every visitor who walks into my home believing it to be a virtual Garden of Eden. I think I’ve figured it out.

I don’t care about plants.

They’re just so . . . needy. Look at them over in the corner of the living room, leaves dull and lifeless, holding their breaths until they turn yellow. It’s like they’re dramatically gasping, “Hey, we’re thirsty over here.” Or, “You overwatered us again.” I mean, make up your mind. Underwatering turns the leaves yellow and overwatering turns the leaves yellow and lack of nutrients turn the leaves yellow. The way I see it, it’s easier to grow yellow plants than green ones so I’m just doing them all a favor.

I had some kind of tall green thing given to me as a housewarming present when I moved into this house a year ago, and I want you to know I’m incredibly proud of how long it lasted. It sat on my kitchen island until last week. Pretty good, right? It wasn’t thirsty. It wasn’t drowning. It had all its vitamins, I guess. It was safe inside where I keep the air conditioner at a comfortable arctic setting. It had everything in the world to live for. And do you know what took it down? The pot was too small. I threw that whiner in the trash last week, wrestling its rangy stalks into a kitchen-sized garbage bag while I closed my eyes so it couldn’t accuse me of committing a crime. “Don’t look at me like that,” I told it, gritting my teeth as I tied off the bag.

Last night it reappeared. In my dreams.  I think I’m being haunted by a house plant.

There’s another possibility. I don’t think it’s my fault that I can’t grow things. I come from a short line of women with overly green thumbs. It’s a genetic disorder which, I’m sure I read somewhere, could be caused by consuming too much broccoli. At any rate, they kept all the luck with plants for themselves and I didn’t get any. Which is fine with me. I don’t like broccoli anyway. 

Still, people who brag about “shoving a stalk of rutabaga in the ground and watching it take off” really get on my nerves. They don’t understand people like me. A good friend of mine sat me down once and tried to fix me. She was one of those broccoli lovers.

“All you have to do is water them,” she said about African violets, like it was easy. I stared at her like she was speaking Portuguese.

She nodded, noticing the problem. “Or maybe you could just hang pictures of plants around your house,” she offered weakly, like I hadn't already thought of that.

“Then I’d have to dust them,” I answered.

She bit her lip. “Yeah, vicious cycle."

I thought that was the end of the discussion. But when Christmas rolled around, she gave me a special gift. I opened the wrapping and pulled a small, handcrafted clay pot out of the box. It was filled with potting soil over a Styrofoam base and held a cluster of greenery.

“It’s a Velvet Plant!” she said, clapping her hands in delight. “I made it myself.”

She did. There were seven handsewn leaves crafted of wire and dark green velvet, each securely shoved into the Styrofoam base and artistically bent to resemble a houseplant. I looked at the tiny card protruding from the soil and read its name. “Fictus Phyllos.”

“It means Fake Plant,” she told me. The card also contained care instructions. “Never water. Requires no sunlight. Thrives on neglect.”

A tear escaped my eye. I loved that little plant. But I still had to dust it.

A few weeks ago, one of my granddaughter’s cousins asked me to take care of her snake plant for the weekend while she and her family flew out of state for a wedding. Apparently because my surviving houseplants pretended to be happy, she had the impression I could keep her beloved plant alive for five days.

“All you have to do is keep it in a spot with indirect sunlight and water it on Wednesday and Saturday,” she said, fully confident that those were simple directions. “I’ll pick it up Monday,” she finished. I broke out in a cold sweat but assured her that I would keep it alive. Actually, I didn’t use those exact words. I just smiled and prayed for a miracle. I’m only human, you know.

But I did keep it alive and to my enormous relief, she picked it up as promised on Monday and I never had to look at it again.

I don’t get it. I don’t understand how other people can keep green things green unless they’re buying plastic plants. I don’t know why trees keep growing in the desert and dehydrated roses can bloom and Mexican Petunias look deprived every afternoon yet explode with purple blossoms each and every new morning. The only thing that makes me think I’m not as pathetic as I seem is this time of year, when fall arrives. Every single leaf on the ash tree overhanging my patio is about to turn brown and fall to its death on the concrete below, leaving an expression I can only describe as bewildered consternation on that massive tree in the pasture.

If even God struggles to keep things looking green sometimes, I must be in pretty good company. 

With thanks to Chad Miller for pretending to be a worse gardener than me. Nice try, and thanks for the great picture. The original photo can be viewed here: Everyone in my family has a "green thumb," except me. The… | Flickr

And So I Write

August, 2021

“This is pain,” she says. Hand over heart, or solar plexus or gut, wherever your body concentrates your grief. “May I be kind to myself,” she adds, waiting while I repeat after her. “May I be compassionate with myself, may I accept myself,” she finishes. This is the exercise she taught for when grief surrounds me, heart and soul and mind and body and I can’t breathe or find my way out and think I’ll never survive this loss.

This is pain.

This is grief.

This is hell.

I knew coming home to my temporary apartment might feel like this. Coming home after a big trip is always anticlimactic. But this time I came home alone. Without my right arm. My other half. My everything. I drove into the driveway, five thousand miles after I set out for his memorial service in Florida and sat in the car taking deep breaths.

This is it, I thought. From now on, I’m on my own. Still Rob’s wife, but no longer sharing life with him, shopping for us, planning or dreaming or laughing or loving or even bickering. The echoes of our life together are agonizing. The memories are too much, and my brain won’t let me look at them right now.

Today, everything hurts. Unpacking is always a chore. Today it takes every ounce of energy I possess to pull things out of the solitary suitcase and put them away. What is to become of me? What is my purpose now without Rob beside me? All the courage everyone else sees in me is invisible when I look in the mirror at my tearstained face. 

Who knew courage comes packaged in weeping?

I have lists of things to do. Breathing on this planet requires schedules. Appointments. Shopping. Consuming. Repeat as necessary. It’s been five and a half months since Rob died. Died. I hate that word. The only comfort I have right now is knowing how much God hates it, too, even though pastors insist that 'blessed in the sight of God is the death of His saints.' Jesus wept with loud, obnoxious sobs at the grave of his friend, Lazarus. 

Death was never what God had in mind.

But it’s the human experience. We’re all one hundred per cent terminal. That doesn’t worry me anymore personally. Still, the thought of losing another loved one is too much. “Too much.” That’s what my mother-in-law said as we hugged in her house last week. She’s buried all three sons and her two sisters in the space of three years. Nine years ago, she buried her own beloved.

Death is too much. 

I’d love to be happy again. Some people say it’s a choice. “Look on the bright side,” they encourage. “Be grateful for the years you had together.” And, “Remember how many other people are suffering, too.” Or maybe that’s what I tell myself in the moments when grief suffocates me. I’ll tell myself anything just to catch my breath.

Don’t mind me. This is still early grief, I’m told. That’s not good news. How many more day after days lie ahead of me, missing Rob and trying to absorb the truth that he’s not here anymore and never will be again?

A reality like that is too much.

August, 2023 

“This is pain,” I remind myself, thirty months after he died. I put my hand over my heart again the way she taught me to and give name to what I feel. “This is grief,” I say, for the thousandth time. I glance toward the kitchen that he never saw at the framed word art I hung there. “Be Kind To Yourself” it admonishes, reminding me of what she told me at the end of every session until one day, a few months into this sad space where I live, I blurted out, “What does that even mean?”

“It means to allow yourself to be human, to experience the suffering, the grieving. It means to treat yourself the same way you would treat another person who is hurting. With kindness. Gentleness. Compassion for yourself for all you’ve been through.”

For all I’ve been through.

I have lost so much. Some things I can’t mention here. Significant and difficult but also too personal. As for the others . . .

Two and a half years ago, I lost my beloved. My darling. My safe place. My true north. My best friend and playmate and first love and last love. And with him all the dreams we created together. The life we built. And our future.

In short order, I lost the home we’d just bought. The dream of sitting on our newly finished back deck looking out over the acre and a half that merged into forestry land, scanning the trees for glimpses of deer and elk while drinking morning coffee and cocoa. We never sat out there. Instead, we slept in separate hospital rooms until I was released and he never came home.

There’s been more loss since I drove to Florida to mourn with our family for him. Nearly a year to the day after losing Rob, our dog, Brody, died. The one with the tender heart who came to me and positioned himself against me every time the tears fell. He was six. I don’t know what happened. One day he was happy and playful, and the next day he changed. Within a month I told him goodbye as the vet carried him away, his loving spirit gone forever.

Sometimes there is too much loss. Too close together. Six months after Brody died, the counselor who walked me through the worst time of my life and reminded me to be kind to myself, retired. Some healing strategies were left suspended and incomplete. I bought a book she recommended to use on my own. It’s not exactly the same.

Grief, the feared stranger, came to my house to live. And stayed. I’d rather have my dog.

Long before our last session together, I worried out loud with my counselor about crying in front of my grandchildren. Would they be afraid to be around me? Would my tears frighten them or make them feel that hanging out with only YaYa and no Chief seemed empty? Would it remind them too much of their own loss?

“You are modeling grief for them,” she said. “They grieve their Chief, but there will be more losses in their lives. And when they experience them, they will know how to grieve. Because they watched you do it.”

What a strange purpose to have in this life I live daily but no longer recognize—modeling grief and the freedom to live in sadness and sorrow. “For as long as it takes,” she told me. That’s how long grief lasts.

I often describe this abrupt change forced on me as “feeling shattered.” Sometimes I feel an urgency to put the pieces back together as soon as possible. The pressure to get back to normal only complicates the process. The thing is, Rob and I were one. It’s God’s design in marriage. It took forty-six years of loving each other, goofing up together, misunderstanding and forgiving and trying again to discover who we were both apart and as one and then, somewhere along the way, I knew him better than anyone else on earth, as he also knew me. 

We were a team. We had each other’s backs. Sometimes we had each other by the throat, but those times were rare. We liked each other. We laughed together and cried and dreamed together. We won and lost together. That one hurts the most. The day we lost everything together. We lost the “together.”

You can’t put a shattered life back “together” when half the pieces are missing.

I miss him tonight. I miss him every night and morning and the hours in between. How could I not? He’s in my DNA. I hear myself saying the things he said. When I drive home late at night, I reach for my phone to text him that I’m on my way, but no one is there to read that text and I remember too late to stop the catch in my heart. To my surprise last fall, I began craving foods I’d never enjoyed before, all his favorite flavors. Baked goods like pumpkin muffins and ginger snap cookies.

But not fruitcake. I’ll never crave fruitcake.

Maybe tasting the things he loved makes him feel close to me again. Almost three dimensional, the same way he appears when someone is willing to listen to a memory of what we built together. Yet another reason why I journal about this grief. Telling my story and writing about him and our life nearly makes it tangible again.

Evenings are the hardest. I’m tired. I’m cooking for one on the nights I can convince myself to do it. I eat most meals by myself. And regularly I tell God, “I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know how to do this life that I never wanted and never asked for and was forced into living.”

I had no choice. Did I say that loud enough? I never had a choice about being widowed. He never had a choice about dying. And leaving me and our family. Losing Rob still feels like losing an arm. It was an amputation. A tearing away of the two who became one.

This is pain.

This is grief.

Some days, this is still hell.

This is processing all of that, writing about it here, trying to find my way in the dark, doing the thing I don’t know how to do. Because I’ve never been here before and yet here I am.

And so I write.

I have to dump all of this pain out of my soul so I can breathe.

And so I write.

I write because shoving all of these feelings down out of view would destroy me. And that is what I know grief is not supposed to do.

In whatever ways we are alike or very different, we humans have this in common: we will all grieve at some point in our lives. If we let it, grief can connect us, enabling us to have compassion for ourselves and each other. If we don’t, or if we try to fix people who don’t need to be fixed, we all lose.

I, for one, have lost enough.

 

 

“Some things cannot be fixed; they can only be carried. Grief like yours, love like yours, can only be carried. Survival in grief, even eventually building a new life alongside grief, comes with the willingness to bear witness, both to yourself and to the others who find themselves inside this life they didn’t see coming. Together, we create real hope for ourselves, and for one another. We need each other to survive.”

 ― Megan Devine, It's OK That You're Not OK: Meeting Grief and Loss in a Culture That Doesn't Understand